Profits per employee have gone up for the second year in a row, according to a study by the financial analysis company Sageworks, suggesting that companies continue to get more out of their employees as they slash their payrolls in an effort to get leaner. The findings also suggest that profits have been rising despite the lack of a corresponding increase in wages.

The private companies surveyed by Sageworks reported that their profits per employee climbed to $15,278.72 in 2011 from $12,488.02 in 2010, a rise of about 22 percent for the year. The figures for 2010, in turn, represented an increase of about 24 percent from the 2009 profits per employee, which were $10,045.56.

Oh, heck....who am I kidding? It's all Obama's fault.

In a just-barely-related matter, are you really annoyed by bloggers like me who always write things like "um" and "you know" in their posts? The New York Times tells me it's all the fault of late novelist David Foster Wallace.